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‘Is some riddle solved by my surviving forever? Is not eternal life itself as much of a riddle as our present life?’
Ludwig Wittgenstein, Tractatus logico-philosophicus, 1922
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Given the extent to which modern-day pagans take as a truism that many of our folk customs have, unconsciously, retained relics of their heathen origins is traceable to the success of one man’s major opus – Sir James George Frazer’s The Golden Bough, a multi-volume work published in the 1890s.
‘It is difficult to overrate the influence of The Golden Bough. It offered a pattern which was immediately and attractively available; and it proceeded to dominate attitudes and thinking to a remarkable extent. The vegetation drama, ritual death and resurrection, the sacred tree, became accepted elements . . .’ So observed Roy Judge in his study of the Jack-in-the-Green [1], also noting that the Frazerian influence was complex.
While modern day researchers find little of Frazer’s work holds up to scrutiny, his opinions were accepted almost without question for about 60 years. In the introduction to the abridged one volume edition of The Golden Bough, prepared some thirty years after the original research [2], Frazer wrote: ‘I have neither added new material nor altered the views expressed in the last edition; for the evidence which has come to my knowledge in the meantime has on the whole served either to confirm my former conclusions or to furnish fresh illustrations of old principles.’
Frazer’s objectives were straightforward: to demonstrate that Christianity derived from the same principles as so-called ‘primitive’ religions. Within the constraints of the then-active blasphemy laws Frazer strove to treat the Bible as another rich mythology – to be studied objectively, and with the same contempt for the beliefs as academics showed for non-christian faiths.
A group of men with bells on their legs, dancing frenetically’
Frazer’s views were based on the work of Sir Lawrence Gomme, Sir Edward Tylor and Wilhelm Mannhardt although Frazer proved to be the better known of these researchers. Frazer in his turn influenced Sir Edmund Chambers and Cecil Sharp. Sharp, almost single-handedly, inspired the English folk dance revival and, in the process, drew attention to the then-dying remnants of other folk customs. Sharp’s Frazerian-influenced opinions were contested at the time but between 1914 and the early 1970s his views were unopposed – folklorists ‘were not concened with evidence (or the lack of it) of historical continuity, and . . . relied entirely upon similarities and parallels in form to construct grand hypotheses.’ [3]
Part of these ‘grand hypotheses’ was that morris dancing was an ancient rite which had remained unaltered for centuries. When an historian, Barbara Lowe, published her studies of the earliest origins of morris dancing in 1957 [4] she was totally ignored. This is not in the least surprising, as what she discovered runs entirely counter to Sharp’s fantasy. Lowe found that morris dances first appeared about 1450 as a new craze in the courts of the nobility and royalty throughout western Europe. These courts were notoriously fashion-conscious and briefly-favoured novelty was as prevalent then as in our own times.
Courtly morris of the fifteenth century was a Christmas-tide entertainment involving a group of men with bells on their legs, dancing frenetically in an attempt to woo a lady. After this display of male vitality she, in fine fickle, gave her heart to a fool. Not only did this little scenario find favour in the palaces of England, soon it was spreading among the common people. First along the Thames to nearby towns and then, by the sixteenth century, throughout England. Along the way it became less a feature of Christmas than of the Maytime or summer games.
A few ‘traditions’ really are traditional
The history of morris dancing is similar to many other popular traditions. A number of historians have intensively studied specific aspects of ‘traditional’ customs – and repeatedly revealed that these traditions peter out before the eighteenth century. A few ‘traditions’ really are traditional – but there are few of them. When we decorate our homes with greenery and give each other presents at Christmas, we are following a custom which goes back ‘time out of mind’. Few of us light bonfires for Mayday or Midsummer but, up until the late nineteenth century, this was a common-place custom which, also, can be traced back beyond written records. Probably the erection of Maypoles is equally archaic. But written records ominously peter out for all other ‘traditional’ customs
Historians know well that events are best shown up in written sources when they contravene custom or legislation. The names of common people most frequently enter the annals of written history when they appear in court records for greater or lesser crimes; not infrequently, drunkenness on feast days. The once-heated debates of churchwardens and clergy are veiled beneath the dry records of parish registers. These same registers reveal year after year the amounts spent preparing for such festivities as ‘church ales’ – until, abruptly, these expenses are no longer part of the meticulous lists. No one at the time explicitly stated that church ales had been superseded by other (less bawdy) forms of fund-raising, but the evidence is clear enough. So the genealogy of popular customs can be pieced together.
‘How traditional was “traditional”?’
There is clear evidence that in the late medieval era ‘new devotional fads were enthusiastically explored by a laity eager for religious variety’ [5] The greatest of the feasts of the late medieval liturgy, Corpus Christi, apparently well-established since time immemorial, was comparatively new, dating only from the thirteenth century. Such were the religious practices of the populace. This was ‘traditional religion’ in Britain – although this simply begs the question, ‘How traditional was “traditional”?’ Running in parallel were the ascending aristocratic interests in astrology and the attempts to subdue ‘witchcraft’ and the various activities of ‘cunning’ men and women. The boundaries between religion and magic were less well-drawn than they are with the hindsight of modern mentalities [6].
Behind these terse paragraphs are entire academic careers picking over the ways in which social history is a patchwork of ever-evolving changes. We think of our own times as being subject to unique processes of change. Yet history records an ever-changing flow. The difference of the modern day is mostly that the processes of communication are more immediate and more detailed, giving a greater awareness of change. An additional and pertinent difference is that, until recently, the ‘meanings’ of popular customs were not fixed by written accounts. Why things were done was the least rooted aspect of these activities.
‘Customs quite out of fashion’
Peeling the layers of the onion away, the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries saw the pro-Reformation and counter-Reformation sway back and forth with greater or lesser enthusiasm and enforcement. The reign of Elizabeth I provided an era of comparative tolerance, where the country was officially Protestant but the zeal of the senior clergy could be, and was, vetoed by the monarch.
During the Civil War and Restoration there is widespread written evidence of the way new religious and social ideals were being promulgated. The sometimes brutally aggressive Puritans stripped the churches of their images, rood lofts and altars – while a smaller, less-aggressive number, from time to time attempted to restore some of the ‘popish’ traditions [7].
Just how thoroughly the Reformation and Civil War swept away traditional customs is revealed by writers of the time. John Aubrey is a name well-known for his early antiquarian interests. He was a child before the Civil War and could see first-hand how many local customs, such as midsummer bonfires, had vanished during the Interregnum, ‘the civil wars coming on have put all these rites or customs quite out of fashion.’ [8] Aubrey also tells how the once-annual custom of decorating the salt-well at Droitwich on the patron saint’s festival was prohibited; the well promptly dried up. The ceremony was restored the following year, whereupon the water once again flowed.
Much has been made of the Restoration of Charles II and the establishment of Royal Oak or Oak Apple Day (29th May) as a ‘surrogate’ for the Mayday festivities prohibited by the Puritans. Yet closer inspection reveals that over thirty years of Puritan campaigning had wrought a severe dislocation and the popular pastimes which were ‘restored’ were different in nature and character. In essence, the post-Restoration festivities were not so much spontaneous customs of the common people as events which were organised by the ‘gentry’. It was the subtle transition from ‘participating’ to ‘attending’. [9]
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